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Updated: June 26, 2025
The dragonflies were bustling about their business: what it was not easy to discover, but they went by in companies of small flies, with now and then a great one that rustled past on gauzy wings.
All round the town were abundance of the curious Tropidorhynchus timoriensis, allied to the Friar bird of Australia. They are here called "Quaich-quaich," from their strange loud voice, which seems to repeat these words in various and not unmelodious intonations. Every day boys were to be seen walking along the roads and by the hedges and ditches, catching dragonflies with birdlime.
At the same time I do not think he was ever so stupid as to imagine that this was a sign of superior faculty and strength of mind. Still, he was becoming more and more a miner, and less and less a man of the upper world where the wind blew. On his way to and from the mine he took less and less notice of bees and butterflies, moths and dragonflies, the flowers and the brooks and the clouds.
Ten days passed away in this quiet manner, my attention divided between the birds, the dragonflies, and the clacking grasshopper, who went jerking himself about with a noise like a subdued lawn-mower, giving one the impression that his machinery was out of order. The tenth day of sitting we had a south wind.
The dragonflies, by the way, were well worth looking at; indeed, they divided my interest with the birds. So many and such variety I never noticed elsewhere, and they acted exactly like fly-catching birds, staying an hour at a time on one perch, from which every now and then they sallied out, sweeping the air and returning to the perch they had left.
The Gorgons were more like an awful, gigantic kind of insect immense, golden-winged beetles or dragonflies or things of that sort at once ugly and beautiful than like anything else; only that they were a thousand and a million times as big. And with all this there was something partly human about them, too.
The current was barely indicated by the gentle oscillation of a few water-lily leaves. Two big blue dragonflies poised and quivered upon our floats, and not a fish seemed to care to disturb them. "Well," said M. Flamaran, "so you are still managing clerk to Counsellor Boule?" "For the time." "Do you like it?" "Not particularly." "What are you waiting for?" "For something to turn up."
There was satisfaction in the anticipation of these preparations. Dwelling on them he fell asleep. He woke late in the afternoon, when the sun was yellow on the wall, the shadow of the cottonwood leaves quivering like dragonflies' wings. On the little table beside his bed, near his glass, a bit of white paper lay. He looked at it curiously. It bore writing in ink and marks as of a pin.
Clouds of insects danced and buzzed in the golden autumn light, and the air was full of the piping of the song-birds. Long, glinting dragonflies shot across the path, or hung tremulous with gauzy wings and gleaming bodies.
Morsfield or no Morsfield and now the poor wretch has got himself pinned to the plank, like my grandson Bobby's dragonflies, I don't want to say anything further of him she doesn't have much of a welcome at Steignton! If I were a woman to wager as men do, I 'd stake a thousand pounds to five on her never stepping across the threshold of Steignton.
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